Promoting Your Social Value, Social Impact and Social Accounting

Summary

This training course is designed to demonstrate the added benefits that promoting your social value, for example through impact reports or social accounting, can bring. To make sure that you don’t just do the hard graft and make sure you enjoy the added profile, publicity and opportunities this offers, as well as contributing to the growth, status and profile of social value itself.

The half day course covers what you need to do, how to do it, and what to watch out for.

This course is delivered by Julia Brosnan of Dovetail Agency www.dovetailagency.co.uk – the change making agency.

Course Details

You go to all the effort to gather information on your social value and social impact, or maybe you’ve started – or even finished – your social accounts. These are big tasks which require a new approach, which is difficult to fit into the demands of every day. And even when you’ve finished – what real benefits are you going to see, apart from the inner satisfaction of having done the right thing?

Here are three important points to spur you on:

1. Sharing and promoting your findings completes the process of assessing social value/impact and undertaking social accounting, enabling you to reap the many benefits it can yield. This is because in the process of doing this you will have uncovered many potential stories, some of which – because of their very nature – are known as ‘media gold.’ For example if you are an amateur sports organisation – you are competing for media space, funding and partnership opportunities with all other amateur sports organisations. However your social value/impact work may well uncover all the additional benefits of what you do aside from just sport. These may include health and wellbeing; crime reduction; social cohesion; positive mental health etc. Once you have this information – as well as being able to think about applying different funding pots and forging new partnerships, you also have a whole new world of media opportunities. The editor of a health page/site/publication is potentially far more interested in a sports story than yet another health story. You have a unique angle and this is highly prized in a media always hungry for new approaches.

2. Unlike the competitive commercial world – this market is not finite, in fact it’s the opposite – expanding with each new story. For example shoe manufacturers fight each other for media space, as there’s only so much anyone wants to hear about shoes. However social value/impact and social accounting are so broad in that the content of the stories it unearths can cover so many areas that organisations aren’t competing against each other for space. In fact the more social value/impact and accounting stories that are out there the better, because the more the process itself becomes known, and therefore becomes more accepted. Which leads onto……

3. … by promoting your social vale/impact and accounting stories you are contributing to the overall ’movement’, in that you are helping to bring it more into the mainstream, to get to better known and more widely accepted, and this is turn, will bring added benefits to everyone. For this to happen your stories will need to be ‘tagged’, and this is something we’ll look at in the session.

Pre-Session

Participants will be asked to complete a form the week before the course detailing:

• Yourself and your organisation
• Where you are up to in the social value/impact and social accounting process
• What experience you’ve had with promoting stories to date
• Particular concerns with regard to this – risks, stories backfiring,
• Bring along stories you’ve used and seen – which will be referred to in the session.